BrightonSEO Sep 2013 – Our Key Takeaways

Last Friday, the team at Creare headed down to Brighton for our third trip out to BrightonSEO. As always, Kelvin Newman and the team put on a great show for everyone – with 3 fantastic tracks running throughout the day – featuring speakers from the UK’s leading search and digital agencies.

We split up throughout the course of the day to catch as many speakers as possible – and all came home with some great industry insights and takeaways – covering everything from link building & content marketing, to technical SEO & the rising importance of Big Data. Below are our key takeaways from the talks we attended…

Social Track

Oliver Snoddy (Twitter) Real-Time Marketing for any Brand

Twitter UK’s Head of Planning shared a very engaging look at Twitter’s success for helping brands with real-time marketing.

15 Million daily users of Twitter in the UK, 80% are on mobile.

In the USA, Twitter Ads are being synchronised with TV commercials – a feature which is eventually coming to the UK.

A Twitter and TV marketing combo leaves consumers 58% more likely to purchase a product than advertising on TV alone.

Twitter trends reveal the best time to target different consumers, depending on the industry and target market.

Jen Lopez (Moz) The Ins & Outs of Testing Social

Moz.com’s Director of Community give an interesting talk testing social media, particularly for promoting content such as blog posts. Using Moz’s own blog as an example, Jen shared the following key things she’d learnt:

There is no universal ‘best-time-to-tweet’. Use your own data and experiment to work out the best time of the day/week to tweet about your content.

Facebook OpenGraph and TwitterCards can make it easier for other people to see and share your videos

Top tips for video optimization using YouTube include: unlisting videos that have poor levels of engagement; finding other sites that have embedded your video and making use of their video keyword tool.

Short videos can be more cost effective to produce and are ideally shared using Instagram & Vine.

LoMo (Local & Mobile)

Bridget Randolf (Distilled) Mobile Strategy for Small Businesses

Bridget has been working at Distilled for almost one year as an SEO analyst. Her fast paced presentation on Mobile Strategies for Small Businesses was very engaging and packed full of facts and live examples.

Only 70% of big brands have a mobile site.

25% of people have made a purchase on their mobile.

77% of smart-phone users browse products on their device – around half of these then buy in-store.

50% of all online sales for Mother’s Day 2013 were on mobile phones. If you have any clients who are florists, get their responsive site launched now!

NAP Citations (Name, Address, Phone Number) – are becoming increasingly important in Local SEO ranking factors. Ensure you have consistency in your NAP across the sites and directories it appears on. Whitepark offer a Local Citation Finder tool from about $20 per month.

Dara Fitzgerald (FreshEgg) Next Gen Measurement in Google Analytics

Use Google Analytics to track a multi channel customer journeys.

Identify the customers you really want and find them using GA. User segments can be used to support this – e.g. set up a custom segment to identify all users that spend £50 over a length of time. This allows you to track the lifetime value of key customers more effectively and identify the routes they take on your site. The importance of repeat business cannot be underestimated and GA must be used to track this as well as one off orders.

Growth Hacks

Ali White (Call Tracks) More Offline Leads from Online Traffic

Call Track’s Head of Marketing & Sales gave an insightful presentation into the importance of telephone enquiries and tracking on your client’s website.

Call Track’s software allows for phone calls to be added into Google Analytics as a dimension.

On average 7% of their client’s calls go answered and 2% get a busy line. Therefore 9% of inbound leads are missed. Of this 9% only 43% call back.

Google suggest you can achieve a 6-8% uplift in Adwords conversion if you include a phone number within the advert.

If you’re selling internationally, use an international number. On responsive sites, an 0800 number works really well for desktop but consider switching this for a local (01/0) number when the site responds down to mobile.